


Star

by occasionalphantomfiction (SemiRetiredAuthor)



Series: Phanniemay 2016 [13]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Gen, I love my child but he'd probably deal with depression sometimes, Phanniemay, Phanniemay 2016, Phanniemay16, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 01:04:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12570212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SemiRetiredAuthor/pseuds/occasionalphantomfiction
Summary: Eight-year-old Danny Fenton had spent many painstaking hours crafting a reproduction of the night sky on his bedroom ceiling. Sixteen-year-old Danny Fenton still appreciated it.





	Star

Eight-year-old Danny Fenton had spent many painstaking hours crafting a reproduction of the night sky on his bedroom ceiling.

The creation reflected Amity Park’s September skyline, and it had been the only thing the boy had wanted to talk about for the weeks surrounding its creation. He couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away at night as his glow-in-the-dark stars stole the show in his bedroom, neglecting his schoolwork and even recreation for far more time than the Fentons were willing to admit before they had noticed and intervened. Even then, Danny remained enamored with his constellation replicas.

Eight-year-old Danny Fenton had been the most obviously space-obsessed Danny, but nine-year-old Danny was a little more subtle and a little more obsessed, and ten-year-old Danny was that little bit more enchanted, and so on and so forth. Sixteen-year-old Danny loved the stars still more and was at this moment laying silent in his darkened bedroom, spacing out as he stared into mock-space.

While it seemed counterintuitive, the fake stars held more allure for Danny as his life became more stressful and complicated. He spent increasing amounts of time just lying in his bed staring at the glow of the stars despite his notably decreasing amount of free time. The more time he spent fighting ghosts, the more time he wanted to spend spacing out and forgetting the outside world afterward. There was a distinct comfort that came from forgetting the entire world around him and simply staring upward for an hour or two, long enough to forget that he’d spent two hours fighting ghosts today, that he had three hours of homework due the next day, that he could still get five hours of sleep tonight if he just started now, that he was clearly and undeniably in over his head right now.

Sometimes he wished on the ceiling stars, silly as it had seemed the few times he’d told others when he was younger. If shooting stars held the intrinsic power to grant one’s deepest wishes, who was he to say that plastic glow-in-the-dark replicas couldn’t have that same ability? As one might expect, his wishes had morphed over the past year, from, “I wish Paulina would notice me soon,” to, “I wish Dash would leave me alone,” and eventually to hopes more along the lines of, “I wish my parents would stop shooting at me instead of the real ghosts,” and “I wish everything would just stop.” Unfortunately for Danny, these wishes made while desperately curled up alone in the dark had stopped coming true quite a long time ago when the wishes had stopped being as simple as the hope that his mother would buy him his favorite ice cream or that he would do well on one of his fifth-grade math tests.

Even Danny himself could admit any other teenager that thought the way he’d come to think would easily be diagnosed with depression, but he knew he couldn’t do anything about it as things were. How do you explain to others that you’ve become indifferent to the world now that it’s become a constantly failing balance of trying to get enough sleep while maintaining decent grades, staying healthy, and hiding a secret alter ego that protects everyone in a 20-mile radius? All he could do was fight the frequent urge to sit still and do absolutely nothing along with the occasional inner drive to jump into a clearly fatal situation just to end the slow torture of his life that stretched across weeks and months now. He still knew that he was Amity Park’s best protection as things stood, and that helped stop him from ever fully considering some of the ideas the newly evident darker parts of his mind supplied at random. Alone in his bedroom was the only time he allowed himself to completely feel how his mind wanted him to feel; here was his safe space to check out of reality for a few hours at a time to escape from it all and recover from the physical, mental, and emotional toll of what his life had become.

This was life now.


End file.
